Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more

1. Start Pitches with Action

When telling your story (pitch, blog, conference), start in the middle of the action or with your unique insight to immediately grab attention, like a thriller movie. This is crucial because getting attention is the P0 for any interaction, ensuring your audience stays engaged.

2. Design Product from Onboarding

Think about the user’s first introduction and the steps to full value from the very beginning of product design, rather than treating onboarding as a last-minute addition. This ensures the onboarding experience is deeply intertwined and native to the product, providing a seamless learning curve.

3. Regularly Observe User Onboarding

Schedule monthly sessions to watch real users (or target demographics) sign up and onboard to your product. This “embarrassing but educational” practice reveals the true human experience and helps avoid relying solely on conversion numbers, providing invaluable qualitative insights.

4. Prioritize Day Zero Value

Ensure your product provides immediate, tangible value to users, rather than promising benefits months down the line. Products lacking day-zero value struggle with product-led growth because users will easily churn if they don’t see instant utility.

5. Hire for Company & Role Fit

Approach hiring as a two-way street, aiming to find candidates who will genuinely thrive in your company’s specific culture and the role’s demands. Recognize that success at one company doesn’t guarantee success at another, so focus on fit over a generic “successful PM” profile.

6. Utilize Work Sample Projects

For individual contributor PM roles, assign a project (ideally with choice from multiple problems) to assess a candidate’s thinking, solution quality, communication, and basic technical understanding. This reveals more than traditional interviews and helps identify future high-performers who can deliver technically possible and creative solutions.

7. Invest in Early Diversity

Actively seek out and interview a diverse range of candidates, especially women and people of color, to counteract passive inbound biases and lower conversion rates for earlier/riskier businesses. Early diversity creates a self-reinforcing mechanism, fostering a more comfortable and respectful environment that attracts further diverse talent.

8. Assess Product-Led Readiness Early

Consciously decide if your product can truly be product-led by determining if any individual at any seniority level can pick it up and use it without needing high-level buy-in or access to sensitive systems. This strategic decision should ideally be made before coding begins, as it dictates your growth motion.

9. Simplify Onboarding Drastically

Avoid overcomplicating onboarding with multi-step carousels or extensive informational screens, as users have limited attention and don’t care about your product as much as you do. If your onboarding doesn’t feel like you’re “dumbing it down,” it’s likely too complex.

10. Offer Invites Early & Often

For collaborative or social products, embed opportunities to invite others throughout the entire product experience, not just once. This catches “connector” users who are naturally inclined to share, while allowing others to ignore them without negative impact.

11. Extend Free Trial Periods

Allow users to continue using your product for longer during a free trial, as incrementally more people will convert. User timing for purchase is independent of your schedule, often aligning with their own project cycles or quarterly budgets.

12. Define Core Product Identity

Clearly establish your product’s fundamental purpose (e.g., Slack as a “tool for work” vs. social platform). This core identity provides a guiding principle that simplifies thousands of small product decisions and prevents feature creep.

13. Hire First Salesperson Strategically

Bring in your first dedicated salesperson when the founder is absolutely maxed out on sales activities, or when your target customers explicitly expect and prefer to interact with a salesperson before making a purchase. This indicates a natural pull from the market.

14. Build Growth Team Post-PMF

Start building a dedicated growth team once you have a clear sense of product market fit, even if it’s initially achieved through “white glove” onboarding. A growth team can then accelerate and refine this fit, but a foundational product experience is necessary first.

15. Don’t Replicate Without Context

Do not replicate product features or designs from successful companies without understanding their underlying context or effectiveness. Many seemingly successful features might be based on failed experiments or not even be working for the original company, leading to wasted effort.